Jessie Fisher, who received her MFA in Painting with a minor in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2004, is an Associate Professor in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute with a focus on Life Drawing and Sophomore Painting. She has also developed a collaborative summer program in Florence, Italy at SACI (Studio Art Centers International) and is the co-developer of the Studio Nong Residencies through a partnership between the Kansas City Art Institute, the Memphis College of Art, and the GuangXi Arts Institute in Nanning, China. Recent curatorial projects include Dialoghi dell'Arte, currently on view in Kansas City at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center as the first exhibition in an international tour that will take the show to Guilin, China, Florence, Italy, and Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. Upcoming exhibitions include, Dialoghi dell'Arte | International Tour, SunRise | SunSet: Work for the Studio Nong Collective at the Memphis College of Art, Natura Vita | Natura Morte with Scott Seebart at the Jules Maidoff Palazzo in Florence, Italy, and a major solo exhibition of recent large-scale allegorical painting and sculpture will be at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City in October of 2015. In the summer of 2015, Fisher will run KCAI at SACI | An Exquisite Corpse, a 5-week program in Florence, Italy and will be a visiting critic at the International Center for the Arts in Montecastello di Vibio.

Jessie Fisher is a figurative painter and sculptor heavily influenced by the work and aesthetic theory of the Italian Renaissance and whose studio practice looks to the invention and virtuosity of both Bonnard and Titian. Her work fuses the observation and construction of form, in deference to compositional concerns and the creation of a whole. Through a series of self-portraits, life-scale nudes, tapestry-scale trompe l'oeil, and room sized mythological scenes, Fisher lays open the morphology of allegory, and the role of theatricality, overt in the history of painting. Fisher has created an ascetic studio practice through the construction of a compound of home studios where she paints with her lover and Perceptual Painter, Scott Seebart, their son, Valentine, and an intimate group of students and studio assistants.